The men are pink and soft and kind in chaff
and laugh between the quiet creaking ice.
At Shambles Camp we gave ourselves some sleep,
the snow like sand, loose upon the surface,
holds us back as the seasons hurry on.
We had our best hoosh yet – a pemmican
horse-meat stew which really heats the belly.
Canzone, I’ sento gia stancar la penna.
from The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
An earthen cup
an ill woman in the eyes of her lover
a torn-up letter put together again
the inside of a cat’s ear
the mayfly and the firefly
priests. fruit. horses as well as oxen
silver tweezers that still pluck the hair
women of the lower classes
paradise
on an old man’s back
the sound of comb-teeth snapping
the seventh month
(when it is cool) reading
these lines in another girl’s notebook.
The Musician
A Sketch of John Dowland in Denmark
Through pipes and contraptions
I come to you,
from a cellared world
my angular intention
aspires. What’s hellish is
hidden.
Only the beauty
survives.
Through distance and exile
I came to you,
and wormed my way into the
core. Once insidious, now
ridiculous, singing
through pipes and contraptions.
Pavane: Anubis
I give the green-fruit,
try for transcendence,
these the gifts, this the dance,
those the people believing.
I, long as corn,
jackal-headed corn,
scale the heart, feed the dogs,
those the people believing.
Thin limbs
with skirt and flail
foot following flute.
The dancers part
ethic and image,
those the people believing.
A Medieval Scene
The clack of the carriage chasing the bell’s
chirrup.
The burning urge to arrest smells
on the page.
The mirror within an inch of the eye.
Kick me!
if ever I disappoint the image
or break the sabbatizare.
I am clearly
an apple on the slow-moving ass’s
back. Drawn up the hill / whatever pleases.
The clack of the trap chasing the ass moves
me as I think it should move you. These grooves
in the hillside / signs of our obedience.
Mi Donna é Prega
A lady is pregnant, so I must sing
of some wild passion, the saleable type,
love straight as a needle, blunt at the tip,
an accident, and a well-plotted thing.
It grows from the damaged area,
the bit behind the eyes, where thoughts reside,
it is, despite belief, a parasite:
devours reason, exudes hysteria,
you remember what you have never known,
a crimson cloth, a sentimental song,
it spreads its choler along the phloem
causing men to bark, when they mean to sing.
There is no cure, but it can show mercy –
infect another, or kill you quickly.
Jamshid
Invented much, saw much more invented,
watched the marrow bloat, and peopled the land.
Fit of form, never one to catch a cold,
and got the wine, almost all, into the bowl.
Did learn the way before the what, the how
rather than the why, seeing they’d given
me more time than one could ask for – rocks
to sand, and having outdone the earth went
onto the sea.
Have taken orders from
no man, nor a god. Felt just what could touch,
brine in the cut lip, the wind’s embrace. Then,
if needed, bred. So have passed three hundred
years.
Matthew
We say the same things but do not always
Agree; argue with words until out of
Line. Someone must decide what comes and what
Goes; take the axe towards the lyric tree.
Light, swift as a cow’s tail across its rump,
Came. Said I. Beckoned me go, who was gold,
Gathering rust in a small back-end town.
That was it. Exactly as each word fell.
And the shortest. Meek. Made the loudest bang.
The manifold sound of that ringing out
We cannot agree on. How long on each?
Someone should go and put an end to it.
Sant Iago
Credulous mollusc-man, who knew the price
of travel. That it is better to be
somewhere else. Better to have hat and stick,
than wife and kids. Better, even, to have
blisters. We cannot all be masters. One
should follow, trailing behind with the thieves
and rams. But what a scoop of life it is!
Perhaps, while stopped, in the ochre valleys
at Villamajor, or Ciraqui,
you saw in the sky his gathering house,
the tragic loading of his tragic bed,
and knew that walking could not get you there?
Cleopatra Playing Boules
Most Sweet Queen –
No more music, the false maker of mood.
Those in love are poisoned by the general
tongue, singing with a century’s sickness
not their own. Rather Play! Roll the moment
on towards the crisp, cut grass of England,
and breathless, sucking peaches, roll again.
How now, Lady!
Man is the maker, so woman makes joy
in breaking up his boring constancy.
Hear me, Queen.
First, see the playing green swell with laughter
beneath our game. It rolls itself below
the balls and makes no time for history.
White & Manila
for Bink Noll
Your package was not delivered
Because there was no one at home;
We tried to force the window but
Failed, and merely upset the cat.
A second attempt was made, but
When we called at your door you were
Searching ferociously for keys,
And seemed unworthy of the gift.
Your package was not delivered
A third time because we opened it
Ourselves and enjoyed its bright
Entrails hungrily (whilst sorting boys
Swooped around our heads like vultures).
We have delivered over two thousand
Packages this year without fail,
This is due to some fault at the root
Of your character, or something
Unresolved in the tangled
Ecology of your family tree.
Nevertheless, we will endeavour
To call at the threshold of your house
Each day, and hand over a thick packet
Of white and manila notices.
from Seneca the Younger
Spring kills the old man in his sleep, sucks out
the marrow and buries the bones. Will you
doze even when you feel it approaching?
Your dead mass will sprout in the green pillage
of spring. It demands a sacrifice. Half-
way into elm-bark, out of her old skin,
&nb
sp; Daphne wants winter. Much still to be done.
The season decides, the climate dictates
the outcome. You will lose a lot
in the process. After the last green surge
you will look for yourself and probably
not find it. Then you will try to speak and…
your voice will be first to go
and then your good looks, but who will notice?
Head-Hunting
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
Some eat of the body, having the head
safely removed. I do not. There is food
enough in the jungle and there is bread.
Nor do I drink of the blood.
The mask-makers have discarded the host,
filleting the flesh instead of steaming
the bone. The old methods are quickly lost;
they cannot hear their ancestors screaming.
Time passes. It swallows the nights and spits
out the days. My sons are old. One is calm
and the other, of course, is full of knots.
His soul is grasping for the higher palm.
They call me Lazarus, because I talk
of the dead as if I knew them. They hunt
and bring back head-names for the little folk.
My thoughts are long rivers, my knife is blunt.
We drum our songs, get on with the neighbours,
such peace has been very hard to come by.
A wind dies amongst the trees, and the boars
sound like hunters advancing up the Fly
River. The snapping of the spine is like
bamboo breaking: there is the crunch and then
the liquid ripping of tendons. We woke
to find the caustic dance done, our women
siphoned from us. As a boy you must learn
the hierarchy of the parts: a foot
counts for nothing on its own, a jawbone
is better, but a head is the real loot.
We hunt the bird for its ecstatic plume,
the rhino its horn, the monkey its tail.
We seek the things our bodies can’t assume,
man attacks man for his rational.
Into gardens, behind low-pitched houses,
a migrant peace finds another village,
sits down to spell out its vowelled stories.
Outside, the world is on a different page.
How wide they dream, the unforgivable!
plucking out their words as if they had no
muddy root, stretching their pliable
meanings like hunters stringing their bows.
The dreamer half-tormented, half-inspired,
throws a rope to his imagination,
hoping to tie it down to fact. The tired
dreamer, full of knots, that one is my son.
He shakes the room with his upfacing palms,
the men around him vigorously nod.
The talk of revenge breeds eager lambs,
quick to unite, quicker to make a god.
Over the cool grass my feet go, thinking
of where I have been. There are no tracks
that lead to this point, the earth has eaten
them hungrily. For this there are no maps.
and rushing in I clenched all time at once.
He is calm. On my head lies the burden.
Some eat of the body, some take a stance.
NEIL FLEMING
‘I thought, He has been alone in the wilderness for too long, and has become two people.’ – Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (2011)
If there actually is a process, then it comes in two parts, and without the instructions.
First (usually) there is something that wants to be said. And then there is a seed. Without the seed, nothing can happen, because the poem builds up on it like a raindrop sticking to a bit of dust.
For instance: a single self-inventing phrase. Floyd and Sookie pass out cigarettes. (Who are they? I still don’t know.) Or for another instance: there was a time when I couldn’t write anything, and to get out of it, asked my youngest daughter to make up titles which I was then obliged to use. The Gypsy’s Chandelier. Clock with Brass Winding Key.
Also there are stories. Some with pirates.
The something that wants to be said doesn’t care, in the end. It will consume fuel of any kind. Phrase, title, rhythm, cadence, rhyme. It will make words take risks and spring surprises. Or compel some dull polysyllable to yield its secrets. Industrious. Vectoring. Molecule. Furniture. Rhyme schemes, strange ones in particular, feel like maps or guidebooks. Even if all the rhymes get chopped out later, the presence of rules can help uncover the unexpected. The world turns into something else.
And although these poems are filled with mornings and rooks and dogs and Suffolk and pieces of Africa, it is not that I was trying to transcribe them. The natural world is a laboratory, and a place for discussions with my childhood self; it’s a wonder, and a sort of reproach.
New Year’s Eve
A man came up the hill towards us, along the side of the field,
His dog shining beside him in the last light of the Year 2011.
A basket of rooks hung in an oak tree, instead of its missing leaves,
And fell out laughing as the dog went past and the moon rose.
As regards balance, nothing quite lives up to these kinds of days:
The wood-fire starting in the belly of the clouds, the stationary satellite opposite,
The rolling world and the invisible bronze galaxy sideways overhead,
The day’s door closing, the year easing shut like a hatch.
A man came up the hill towards us, along the side of the field,
Treading the same line he did a hundred years ago, or two hundred,
Which was during the Napoleonic Wars, and also the year of the Great Comet,
Unfortunately not scheduled to re-visit these skies until AD 4907.
Sometimes you can stand just at the junction between farmland and heathland,
And the Scots pines a mile off will make it all look like Africa suddenly.
Everything’s made of chalk: moon, sky, geography; thoughts about thoughts.
Sometimes you can stand right at the line between now and afterwards.
Paul McNeil Hill
All afternoon it rains on England out of whale-black clouds.
But it’s May, so my fields and woods are also lit by turns,
And finally around six we see our chance, and walk.
I wear that mountain coat you left here by accident,
And which we kept and used because we always knew
You’d come back sooner or later to collect it.
The dog on the other hand just wears a dog-like grin,
Composed from smells and memories of smells,
And from the shape of running, from being alongside.
Sometimes I think he thinks it’s really you. But then
I’ve often unexpectedly thought it’s you myself: a voice,
A wind-lit shadow keeping pace in the high hills,
Something unspoken, spoken at crossing-points –
Ease, probably. Also the knowledge of wide day.
Nothing that ever any accident could take away.
Camber Sands
Most nights there’s laughter in the dunes,
Even this late, the season almost up.
Stupid young kids, drawn here by god knows what,
Bacardi Breezers, sand in prophylactics,
Over the wire at Pontins, and away like vervets,
Lighting small fires, and September’s big moon.
Only it’s not that, really, is it.
Not when the tide’s a sheet of bronze
And the cliff point beyond Rye glows black like fairyland.
Something else brings us; codgers at dawn,
Wate
rline pilgrims, and the faithful blind,
Metal-detectors with their metal detectors,
The lug-worm trolley and the trolley’s tracks.
Also the boy with the inflatable shark.
It’s the sea, dummy. It’s the homely sea
That will clean everything, take everything,
Forgive all sins, erase all prints.
That’s what it is.
It’s the sea edge, where we have all sat
Since the invention of the universe and all dominions,
Frowning and wondering at hope’s horizon.
Clock with Brass Winding Key
I bought yours in the soukh in Sharjah, remember,
From a thin shop with stuff right up the stairs:
Daggers, mostly, bits of elephants, and coffee pots.
The owner smelled of cinnamon. Mind you, everything
Was part-cinnamon back then, even the red sand,
Which crept constantly at night into the babies’ cots.
How the damn clock got that far, God alone knows.
Made in Japan, it says, in Nineteen Twenty-Three,
Mostly out of wood, hand-painted tin, and lack of doubt.